Top 10 : Biggest assholes in gymnastics

Number 10: John Roethlisberger: You never really hear anything about John to suggest he is an asshole but if you ever listened to the Inside Gymnastics radio show you would understand why he made my list for biggest asshole in gymnastics. During a discussion on the sport he listed Paul Hamm as the best US gymnast of all time male or female. When people on twitter corrected him asking if he remembered a certain gymnast named Shannon Miller he gave huge attitude and suggested the fans of the sport were all stupid making a comment on the lines of, well does she have two all around titles in a row (mentioning Hamm’s World AA win and joke of a win at the Olympics the following year) and then he obnoxiously said NO (You could just see him rolling hie eyes as the stupidity spewed from his mouth) I guess the two AA titles she has back to back never happened. I probably wouldn’t think twice about his arrogance if it wasn’t for the fact he spouted several untruths during that interview (Patriots never taped the walk through dumbass) and that he is a biased piece of shit and clearly that effects his opinion. I’ll assume you all heard the rumor about a certain gymnast having an affair with a married man , guess who was rumored to be the ” man”

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Number 9 : : Bela Karolyi: Many people dislike Bela for many different reasons but the one real problem I have with Bela isn’t the way he treated his gymnasts (I blame the parents of every child that ever sent their kids to him knowing full well what he was like) or the way he tries to make everything about him the one thing I can’t forgive Bela for is the way he screwed 7 innocent teenagers out of a medal at the 1988 Olympics and he isn’t even man enough to admit this is all on him.

Fast forward 4 years and Ellen Berger gets revenge. While I am sure Bela wasn’t thinking about anything but himself in 84 what he did ruined a dream for 7 innocent kids. All he had to do was not be an ass and of course he is incapable of that.

Number 8: Paul Hamm : Some people may think blaming Paul Hamm for defending the Gold medal he thinks he deserved his right and while I might agree with that sentiment in principle I cannot agree with it in reality because another human being had his life changed forever that night and his name is Yang Tae Young ( His name however is not that Korean guy)

Paul Hamm’s arrogant press conference where he got up and belittled the routines of the real victor, Yang Tae Young to defend his win has to be the most obnoxious thing I have ever heard a gymnast do. The real victim in all of this is the true Olympic Gold medalist who has all but been forgotten since then.

I guess Hamm is in his own hell. This all turned him into an alcoholic loner who could have been the toast of the Country but instead chose to go all out for an undeserved medal he probably has in a shoe box under his bed. Thankfully no one gives a shit about his ” historic” win that wasn’t really a win to begin with.

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Number 7 : :Alexander Alexandrov : He can whine about pressure all he wants but the FACT of the matter is he cheated. He lied and he never had to pay for it. Russia can break rules and admit it and it just never seems to be an issue.

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Number 6 : Jackie Fie: Lowering Miller’s scores in 96 (when the judges all agreed but she didn’t)but allowing the Romanians to keep their UB compulsories scores, Lilia on bars in the AA and the bars scores for Dawes where her best routine got her lowest score for her best routine (Dawes even was quoted saying the same thing about why her best routine was scored the lowest) She was Nellie Kim before Nellie Kim but at least she was smart enough to do it behind the scenes and not run down to the judges table. Rumor has it she hated Steve Nunno and even though she played nice in front of people she was consistently heard bad mouthing him when the camera was not around.

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Number 5: NBC Commentating team especially AL TRAUTWIG: His constant stupidity and ridiculous comments are enough to make you throw up. The highlight of his career as a gym commentator for me anyway is when Paul Hamm won a medal over Yang Tae Young in the highbar???? final and he literally screamed that this some how proved Paul should have won the AA over him. Al Trautwig is stupid. He’s fake. He’s a pervert and an annoying little twit. John Tesh might have been repetitive and annoying but he wasn’t a biased asshole just for the sake of being a giant asshole.

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Number 4 : Nastia Liukin : Of course she is on this list. You wouldn’t expect her not to be would you? 🙂 Teenagers make mistakes. That is how they learn so the way she acted when Chellsie beat her in 2005 is not a big deal to me in theory because lets face the facts, we all make mistakes as kids we wish we could take back but when you don’t change that attitude into your 20’s you definitely deserve to be on this list.

See Marta for more reasons

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Number 3 Marta Karolyi : I don’t even know what to say here. Its all been said. She gets paid to mentally screw with the minds of children and we let her do it. We celebrate the Gold medals. We support the federation and while we might bitch about the situation we stand by and let it happen.

Every time she does something corrupt and we think she can’t get any worse she one ups it. The gymnast you want on the Olympic team for one vault isn’t good enough to contribute on another event make her not compete at the meet to qualify to Trials so you can sneak her on to the team (Annia Hatch in 2000)

Want to add your pet “not good enough “gymnast to the Olympic team when she clearly isn’t prepared to put the work into making it on her own allow her to stay home from camps so you can hide just how bad she is until you can give her that free pass to Trials with hopes she might just hit a Bar routine so you get your way ( Nastia Liukin)
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Number 2: Nellie Kim:

Running to the judges table to make sure Nastia got credit for the connection she missed in 08. Getting Paeska credit for Amanar in 2012, the way she thinks she should have had Nadia’s fame. Cheating as a judge giving Bogi and Gutsu 10’s on bars, giving Silivas a 9.8 on vault. The more she cheats the further up the chain she gets in the sport.

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Number 1 TIE : The International Federation of Gymnastics and International Olympic committee. Together they screw this sport up more then they help it.

They allow everything wrong with this sport to exist. They allow Nellie Kim to cheat. They allow her to run the sport. They allow past cheaters to still compete. They allowed the code to change to hide their inept judges. They hire the judges. They allow the rules to apply to some people but not to others.

I also have a huge issue with the way they decide who should and should not lose their medals for cheating. Why is North Korea banned from competing for 3 years for their underage gymnasts yet when Russia lies about Roza Galiyeva being injured they turn the other way and pretend they never saw it. Why was Romania never investigated for under age gymnasts like Gina Gogean , Daniela Silivas and Alexandra Marinescu but China lost a medal for it? I realize the IOC is in charge of the Olympica and the FIG, Worlds but when China lost their medals in 2000 the FIG recommended to the IOC that they take away the medals. Its all connected.

THE CODE:

The reason we have this code is partially due to Paul Hamm falling on the judges table. The IOC wanted a change to the code so they could hide the back lash that came with the way they handled that situation in the first place (Expecting Paul to give back the AA medal instead of doing their jobs as the head of the Olympics to insure that the results were fair and just)

Everything anyone finds wrong with this sport is because the FIG and for the Olympics the IOC allowed it to happen. How can they not be tied at the top of the the top ten asshole list?
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Dishonorable mention. John Geddert. Dominique Dawes. Steve Penny. Difficulty score judges at the 2013 worlds who had one job ( to get the start value right) and they couldn’t even do that. Dominique Moceanu

: I left Gabby off this list because she is a kid who was raised without two stable parents but if she continues to be an ass through her twenty’s she will be on the next list 🙂

Nellie Kim kind of reminds me of Yolanda Saldivar, the woman who killed Tejano singer Selena back in ’95. Considering she would go to jail for killing Nadia, she is getting revenge on killing gymnastics. (Yeah, that’s nutty, but I’m in conspiracy theory mode.)

Trautwig? If he gets arrested for molesting little girls one of these days I will not be surprised. He’s like that creepy uncle all the adults never allow to be alone with kids.

Gotta love how the IOC is now all about the Benjamins instead of promoting the so-called Olympic spirit. I like the Olympics, but I hate the corporate clusterfuck it’s become. I wish a bunch of athletes would just stand up and tell them where to shove it. Of course they’re HQ-ed in Switzerland, so we can’t access the tax returns.

I was watching 2003 nationals and some other dude is with Tim no Elfie. Hes much better than al or John tesh. Still annoying but better. I like your list. I had forgotten John Rothlisburger, mostly because after seeing him as a gymnastics clown or some other such dumb thing in 1997 on the salon selective s tour that included the entire mag 7 I thought he was a complete dork. I try to wipe his existence from my consciousness.

Can’t agree with Alexandrov. He is a brilliant coach and has done a lot of good for the sport. Not to mention working with troubled gymnasts like Moceanu, Boginskaya right after her coach committed suicide and Bizolerchev who was notoriously difficult but AA got him back to the top after a devastating car crash and the resulting injuries.

I firmly believe he was under pressure to deliver medals in 92. He has said so. He always comes across as very genuine, and it does fit that there was pressure for the last of the soviets to deliver on the world stage. Otherwise, there would have been more effort made to have them compete for their own countries.

Bellu and Bitang for instance cheated twice when they were not exactly under significant pressure to do so.

I’d sub in the Rodionenkos. Destroying their own programme, sacked a number of great coaches even after getting results, running down their own gymnasts, racists, blame everyone else for the incompetency of their programme.

How did the rules change? (I’m not remembering, and am honestly curious).

Yeah I don’t think being under pressure is a good enough excuse. Cheating is cheating. I totally agree with GTT about how different countries are punished differently though – how’s that fair? And instead of not allowing the countries to participate in the sport, they should just be fined by an extravagant amount. That way the athletes aren’t the ones getting the brunt of the punishment (by not being able to compete despite their stupid cheating coaches) and there’s less of an incentive to cheat for the sake of being caught. Also, the coaches/leaders involved in the cheating should be forever banned from the sport.

The rules changed to allow underage Romanians? Gina Gogean and Alexandra Marinescu competed underage, fact, and that was B&B’s doing.

I don’t condone cheating. I don’t really care, but I don’t think it’s right either. Fact is, Alexandrov had a good reason to do it. I’m not saying hurray for him, you’ll notice. Anyway, he has achieved an enormous amount in his long coaching career, to define him by what happened in 92 is extremely narrow-minded.

He had a good reason? Are you serious? The Soviet Union was no loner in power by the time the Olympics came around.

Unless your life is at risk there is no real good reason to cheat. Alexandrov does not get some kind of walk because you believe the pressure he received is somehow more important then say the Chinese had in 2008 to succeed at home. Or the US had in 1996.

I know it didn’t. It doesn’t mean the unified team coaches had no pressure.

I mean reason, a reason why he did that. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong. Criminals can have motives and stuff too, it explains mindset, doesn’t excuse the action. I’m not excusing him. Just saying, he didn’t wake up out of the blue and decide to ruin Galieva just because he could.

I also don’t think it should define his long, long career.

China in unproven rumours. It would be a similar setup though. The US…cannot in any way be compared to socialist/communist institutions and their mindsets. There was no Soviet Union in 1992 but it’s not as if the entire operations and makeup of it disappeared overnight. One could argue Russia now is barely removed from it, it seems to be regressing.

Why does it matter why he cheated? This idea you have that he was some how under more pressure then anyone else when he didn’t even have a Country to answer to makes no sense to me. Sorry but we will have to agree to diSagree here.

What he did was for himself. He needed the success to further his career.

how did it further his career though? he ended up going to USA until he came back to Russia just to be kicked out a couple years later. You can hate the cheating but putting it all on him is a bit naive. He was the face of the cheating scandal but there’s no way in hell he was the only one making that choice.

Interesting. I started googling John Rothlisberger Shannon miller it automatically filled in affair. When she got divorced the first time I remembered that infedelity was the issue but I always assumed it was on his part. But I just read that he was the one who accused her of infedelity with a male athlete. Juicy. I never heard that rumor before.

I wonder if in the state of Oklahoma it’s a “fault” state, so if she did indeed cheat her husband would be entitled to a bunch of her estate. Maybe that’s why she covered it up if it did indeed happen. I want to think it didn’t – I would hope she’d have better taste.

I realize he’s not quite involved in gymnastics per se, but I nominate nastias former agent as a dishonorable mention. This guy came out saying Jordyn lost so much marketability after she didn’t qualify for the AA, which was not only ridiculous for him to say, but he went on about how there could only be one sweetheart a la Carly and Nastia? Hello? Nastia made less in sponsorships than Shawn, who was America’s actual sweetheart following Beijing, and Nastia made less than ALICIA, who to four year fans is the girl who cost the USA gold in 2008. Now Nastia had Sheryl as her agent lol.

Also gtt, maybe geddert reads this post and removes the link to your blog LMAO

My guess is he never pit me on the list. Someone just looked up blogs and found this one. Plus I don’t want insiders for that very reason. I am going to give my opinion and if a parent or gymnast wants to talk about it they will but I will never allow ass kissing. This will not be GGMB.lol

“Why was Romania never investigated for under age gymnasts like Gina Gogean , Daniela Silivas and Alexandra Marinescu but China lost a medal for it? I realize the IOC is in charge of the Olympica and the FIG, Worlds but when China lost their medals in 2000 the FIG recommended to the IOC that they take away the medals. Its all connected.”

Somertimes I think the IOC has an unofficial statute of limitations on cheating. Eg., in ’76 there were rumors that the East German women’s swim team was juicing–in fact one American swimmer, Shirley Babashoff, openly questioned that and was called a sore loser. Fast forward 25 years and we find out that in fact EG forced their women swimmers to take steroids, ruinging the lives of many of them. (One ended up transitioning to a male completely, and many have had fertility and other health problems.) EG has *admitted* this and there is a lot of documentary evidence. But the IOC won’t touch it–they refuse to yank the EG medals. Romania *should* have been investigated and punished. (Oh, and runner up should be Octavian Belu for how atrociously he treated poor Marinescu in ’96. God, he’s an ***hole.)

I meant to add Bellu to the list and originally add his have with Alezandrov and titles it, cheaters but then I cam up with the IOC/FIG idea and thought it would make little sense to have two individual cheaters list. I should have added him to my dishonerable mention and meant too,

You can’t disagree with MY list because this is my opinion. I am not asking you to agree or disagree this was just an individual bloggers opinion . You can make your own list if you like. I welcome that and will even blog it if you like.

If a Country cheats they should be banned for life.

The rumors about Gutsu’s fake injury were going on in 92. If the IOC wanted to do its job it could have. They say 8 years statute of limitations but if they know the whole time and don’t investigate it should have no statute of limitation.

My theory on 1988 is that the Karolyis were paid not to get a medal, by the East Germans. So Bella sabotaged the team, because it wasnt like 1988 where he had an athlete that would be another Nadia or Mary Lou and he knew it so he didnt really care and just took the $$

FIG has a statute of limitations of 10 years. Although ex-Soviets and Romanians have admitted to competing underage after the fact, the FIG doesn’t consider confessions as proof. If the paperwork submitted to FIG for a particular gymnast has a discrepancy, that’s when they investigate and discipline.
So North Korea submitted one gymnast (Kim Gwang Suk) as 17 three years in a row in the 90s and FIG noticed. North Korea was sanctioned. Then when the age discrepancy on Hong Su Jong’s paperwork was noticed, North Korea was sanctioned again, which is why their second punishment was so strict.
China got caught when Dong Fangxiao, who was then living in Australia, submitted paperwork to the FIG to work as an official at the Beijing Olympics. She used her real birth date, which caused a discrepancy in paperwork submitted in her competitive career. This was caught when FIG looked into the 2008 Chinese team. Her teammate Yang Yun was investigated then too, and a clip of her admitting being only 14 when she competed in Sydney from a Chinese television documentary about her emerged. However, because all of her paperwork to the FIG has been consistent, she was able to keep her individual UB Olympic medal.
The difference is that the ex-Soviets and Romanians who competed underage have either continued to use the altered birth date on FIG paperwork when they became judges and officials, haven’t worked for FIG, or passed the 10 year limit. That’s why none of their medals have been stripped, even though some have come forward and admitted being underage. FIG has been consistent in what it takes to get caught for falsifying ages, but it is specific enough that it’s not hard to avoid being caught. Just use one birth date consistently during your career and for at least 10 years afterwards in all FIG paperwork…you’re home free.

Interesting, I didn’t realize there was an actual SOL. Thanks for the info. Kind of discouraging they won’t investigate further when there are so many admissions of guilt. Also interesting to note the difference between severity of punishment between FIG and the IOC–specifically that Kim was allowed to keep her World medals whereas the team OG medal of the entire Chinese team was vacated after Dong’s age discrepancy came to light.

It was brought into the divorce originally as grounds for divorce. Then extracted on the final settlement paperwork is my understanding. In other words she paid him more money and he withdrew the claim to keep it off the books. He got “quite” a nice settlement is my understanding

But most of the $$ was hers and he had no pre nup meaning in most states (and I think they were in MA when it went down) you can walk away with all of what you had pre- marriage
So half would be good for him…. He leveraged his settlement into a partnership in a chain of LASIK centers that ended up going bankrupt.

I would like to include USOC for allowing the Karolyis to have the power they have over the program. They’ve been bending over for Marta and Bela for over 30 years, and don’t care about how they run things so long as they get results.